


This is Next Year!

by themastersbeard



Series: This is the Army [2]
Category: Captain America - All Media Types, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Baseball, Brooklyn, M/M, Nostalgia, Recovery, World Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-20
Updated: 2017-10-20
Packaged: 2019-01-20 03:55:16
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,326
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12424518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/themastersbeard/pseuds/themastersbeard
Summary: The Los Angeles Dodgers take the NLCS and Bucky Barnes remembers.2017 World Series ficlets.





	This is Next Year!

**Author's Note:**

> An "advent" series of ficlets which will be posted alongside each World Series game next week. Starts with the Dodgers game of October 19th 2017.
> 
> Set a couple of years after the events of [ 'Some Sunny Day'](http://archiveofourown.org/works/11162250)

It’s mild outside. Mild enough for a quilted jacket pulled up to his chin, for the glove he slips deftly over the fingers of his right hand, and for the glove he fumbles onto the unfeeling fingers of his left. 

It smells like mouldering leaves outside. He breathes in again, the car exhaust burns at the back of his throat. The trees have begun to shed their leaves among the cigarette-butt filled gutters, and onto the pavement. They’ve fenced in all the trees now, neat square enclosures on the pavement. But when? 

The question hangs. He’ll ask Steve. Uncertainty used to make the panic well. 

It sometimes still does, in desperate moments when breaths come unsteady, and he centers himself in 1939. 

Pitching: Casey. Catching: Babe Phelps, then Todd. Camilli at 1B.

Sometimes times slides sideways. Weeks earlier he’d ended up on a roof, his body taut in a crouch and his eyes sharp as he scouted. He was waiting for a man. He’d studied the pictures, the dark slopes of his face and the permanent shadow of his beard. Then things had gone fuzzy and he’d smoked an entire pack of Camels lying on his back and staring at the muddy grey of the sky. 

But Steve couldn’t handle the scent of cigarettes. It triggered coughing fits that triggered sleepless nights until he could be goaded into using the nebulizer-- drugs were expensive-- so Bucky slid down the roof to a fire escape and jimmied a window open with his hands-- one flesh-and-blood and one metal. He was forgetting something, but it eluded him. 

He’d showered, quick and clean and efficient, and came out smelling of artificial apples and then pilfered a clean shirt from the ajar closet. He pulled on slacks, he kept his own shoes, and then he couldn’t remember where he was going.

He ordered a lemonade at a local cafe, and downed it nearly at once.

After, when he’d found his way back again, Steve had stared and stared and stared, and then lay his hand on Bucky’s shoulder, warm and familiar, rubbing back and forth along the tense muscles.

And then time seemed to right itself, ebbing back in waves until he was present and breathing evenly. 

There were no more missions. No more asthma. Captain America still sometimes felt like a betrayal. 

But Steve, Christ, Steve felt like home.

And so did Brooklyn, most times, so did the leaves on the pavement, and the leaves in the gutter choked full of cigarette butts.

Because this city, with its immigrant voices and brownstones and alleys where Steve had been beat up a hundred times, was carved into his bones. 

He knows the streets better than anything. He can remember skinning his knee on Flatbrush and breaking his arm at age seven playing stickball just north of Fulton. 

And he remembers the Rogers’ tenement with its two square rooms and the washing strung up on a line through the kitchen.

A lifetime has passed, has passed, has passed. It’s a single step up from street level to confirm it. 

“James, he’s already waiting for you. You don’t know how much you brighten his day.” 

He manages something like a smile, and it’s goddamn passable.

The secretary smiles back.

Roy’s in his room, in his wheeled chair tucked next to a rumbling gramophone.

“What’s this now?”

Roy doesn’t turn towards his voice, but the faint smile tells Bucky that he’s heard him.

He listens to music like one drinks wine, his head tilted, savouring the notes.

“Jackson 5,” he says finally.

“Another one of your old groups is it, sir?” 

Roy huffs out a quiet laugh: “Are you sure your parents didn’t raise you in a forest, James?” His eyes flicker towards Bucky but don’t focus. “Sometimes I do wonder.”

“Nah, Brooklyn-born and bred. They weren’t big on pop-culture, see.”

The first time he’d come here he’d broken in in the middle of the night and then peered like a shadow through to the room which held the totality of Roy Barnes’ life: the photos of the son who’d shared Bucky’s name and died in Vietnam, photos of their family in the 1930s, Roy and Linda ringing in the new years in 1975, 1984, 1992. There are photos with Charlie Barnes, far older than Bucky ever knew him. His baby brothers. 

And then Bucky had gotten on a bus and gone clear across the country and stared into the depth of the Grand Canyon for a week and tried to answer questions that he could barely guess the shape of. Why? Why? Why? 

And then he’d returned to Steve. 

“You watched baseball though, didn’t you, kid?” 

“Oh, I watched baseball.” Bucky says, with the firm assurance of someone who lived and breathed the summer game.

“Yankees?” 

They’d gone through this before, but Roy’s memory was a slippery thing, fragile and sometime feeble.

“Mets.” Bucky said, because it was as close to the truth as he was willing to venture. “The Toronto Blue Jays too, though.”

“The Mets?” Roy snorts derisively.

“What can I say?” He stretches his fingers out before him, counts them and centers himself. “I’m a fan of Syndergaard’s slider.” 

“Yes, well.” Roy’s fingers fumble to turn the stuttering record over. “Would be a darn bit more impressive if he had actually played this season.”

“It’s the training regiment, the players are all--”

And then Roy’s hand shoots out to reach for the the newspaper folded neatly atop the bed, waiting for Bucky’s arrival.

“Read me the highlights, would you, son?” 

And Bucky does. It’s routine and familiar and comforting in its absurdity. That he was here now, with a man he’d once carried around in nappies, that the man now called him son.

But he chokes down the thought, and he reads out the game highlights. The clean statistics which painted the the colourful narrative of a game well-played and passed.

“Filthy Cubbies,” Roy says finally, fingers curling and his brows swooping over his cloudy eyes. “Who’s pitching tomorrow then? Kershaw?” he sucks in his lips and lets them out with a small smack. “They’ll win. Three-times Cy Young winner. Let the Cubbies have the one game.”

And Bucky, because the the question has been nagging at him for months, asks: “What was it like when the Dodgers left?”

Because the loss, long since forgotten by most, had eaten at him like a half-healed wound.

Roy is quiet, pensive. He turns his head this way and that and passes an aged-mottled hand over his face.

“Took the heart right out of the city.” he says finally. “Took it out and chewed it up and spit back the blasted Mets five years later. My father, God rest his soul, cried, you know. My father cried and that man didn’t have a baseball-loving bone in his body.” 

He leaves with a Jackson 5 record tucked firmly under his arm.

At home, he watches the game with his left ankle bobbing on his right knee. His beer goes warm sitting forgotten on the table. They weren’t his team anymore, not really. But the Dodger blue was familiar as anything. 

He doesn’t hear Steve come in, doesn’t notice him until the Cub’s starter, Quintana, has loaded the bases: Puig, Turner and Bellinger and Kiké Hernandez comes up to bat against Rondon. He swings on the first pitch, and and the ball soars over the right field wall. 

And then Steve whistles through his teeth, and Bucky gives a start. 

“There’s something about it-- if I’ve seen one dinger, I’ve seen a hundred,” On screen Hernandez is buffeted around home-plate by his team-mates. “But I could watch that all goddamn day.”

“A beauty,” Bucky agrees, leaning in to the hand that Steve runs through his hair.

The Dodgers win, Hernandez hits a hat trick, and he kisses Steve soundly in celebration. 

“World Series bound, how about Dem Bums, eh?” 

“Yeah, how about Dem Bums?”

**Author's Note:**

> Dem Bums was the nickname of the Brooklyn Dodgers. The unofficial team motto, as lovingly bestowed by their fans, was "Wait 'til Next Year!"-- a joke aimed at their frequent failure to win a World Series. 
> 
> The title of the fic comes from [ the front page of the Daily News](http://www.gettyimages.ca/detail/news-photo/daily-news-front-page-october-5-headline-this-is-next-year-news-photo/97296057?esource=SEO_GIS_CDN_Redirect#daily-news-front-page-october-5-headline-this-is-next-year-brooklyn-picture-id97296057) after the Dodgers won the pennet series in October 1955. They would go on to win the World Series the same year before leaving Brooklyn in 1957 for Los Angeles. 
> 
> The Kiké Hernandez grand slam was something magnificent, [ and you all should watch it. ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DuBkIztfFPg)


End file.
